phone skills
‘Whenever I’d call my mother on the phone when I was a kid,’ began Brian Van Bower in a column he wrote for WaterShapes’ January 2002 edition, ‘she’d start the conversation by asking me, “Are you smiling?” ’ At a time when the pressure is on businesses to perform with higher levels of client service and accommodation than ever before, that question might carry even more significance than it did when Brian first wrote about it. He continued: ‘Back then, I never gave her greeting too much thought because
It's amazing how many people I meet in the course of my day-to-day life who do not embrace the basic idea that the single most important part of doing business is how they interact with current and prospective clients. Way too often, I'll run into someone - usually an employee, but sometimes (and shockingly) a manager or owner - who just doesn't have a clue or really doesn't seem to care. This happens so often, in fact, that I find my patience growing shorter with the laziness, incompetence or downright rudeness I encounter. It's gotten to the point where I'm
